Just read this book again. And the thing about this is that every time I read it, I get different insights from this. One of my takeaways: Jane Gallagher
“She was a funny girl, old Jane. I wouldn’t exactly describe her as beautiful. She knocked me out, though. She was sort of muckle-mouthed. I mean when she was talking and she got excited about something, her mouth sort of went in about fifty directions, her lips and all. That killed me. And she never really closed it all the way her mouth… She was always reading, and she read very good books. She read a lot of poetry and all. She was the only one, outside my family, that I ever showed Allie’s baseball mitt to, with all of the poems written on it.”
“… she was terrific to hold hands with. Most girls, if you hold hands with them, their goddam hand dies on you, or else they think they have to keep moving their hands all the time, as if they were afraid they’d bore you or something. Jane was different. We’d get into a goddam movie or something, and right away we’d start holding hands, and we won’t quite till the movie was over. And without changing the position or making a deal out of it. You never even worried, with Jane, whether your hand was sweaty or not. All you knew was, you were happy. You really were. “
Jane represents a person who was a perfect, innocent crush for Holden. She, like Allie, did odd things because of guileless, innocent motives. In checkers, she would keep her kings in the back row, not because of strategy or vanity, but because she thought it was cute. She thought they looked good lined up back there and that was more important to her than winning a checker game. Jane was vulnerable. Holden implies that her father was abusive in some way. The tension between Jane and her father reaches a climax on the porch when Jane soundlessly cries. Holden responds to this vulnerability by taking her in his arms and kissing her in a pure and loving fashion. This is a person who has a special place in Holden’s life. And now she is going out with Ward Stradlater.
Another quote that I like.
“This fall I think you’re riding for – it’s a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn’t permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement’s designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn’t supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn’t supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started.”
-J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Chapter 24, spoken by the character Mr. Antolini
